Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage

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in love with Julius Caesar in the Latin class. (In real life she fell in love with Edmund Wilson, not quite the same thing.) Caesar was, she said, ‘the first piercing contact with an impersonal reality … just, laconic, severe, magnanimous, detached’. He wrote about himself, moreover, in the third person (‘the very grammar … was beatified by the objective temperament that ordered it’). In our times, though, more desperate and satiric measures were called for. Her first fiction is characteristed by acts of near-Swiftean impersonation, where she puts on the voice of the detested enemy in order to expose him, and where the ironies are compounded by the fact that the plot is about the defeat of ‘the ordinary liberal imagination’ by some authoritarian, devious poseur. I’m thinking about The Groves of Academe in 1953, in particular, where a boring right-winger gets tenure by insinuating that he’s a secret Red and so enlisting all the campus wets in his defence. McCarthy is of course ‘dry’ about all this; though during these years she wrote several pieces on the death of the novel, or at least the realist novel, dedicated as it used to be to common sense and characters who were more solid than the bright, grotesque types the present threw up. Comic characters, for her, were always secret codes for authorial despair, just as the abuse of the word ‘hopefully’ was a sign of the utter absence of hope.

      Once upon a time novelists had heroes who, however flawed, represented our subjective conviction of human freedom. She was to have no heroes on the page, nor heroines either, though in life she admired and loved Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv, Nicola Chiaramonte and many others. Her greatest novel, The Group, is structured around absences – the absentee hero/heroine, the (unwritable) novel of the common ground, and it still has the dangerous flavour of savage laughter about it. At the time (1963) she managed to get furious reviews from both Norman Mailer and Norman Podhoretz (those failed male Norms): Podhoretz grandly accused her of being ‘wilfully blind to the spirit of moral ambition and the dream of self-transcendence’ (though he was talking about the Thirties, when the novel was set); Mailer accused her of not being a ‘good enough woman’ to write a great book, because she devalued ‘the horror beneath’, and had ‘no root’ (so wasn’t a good enough man either). Her power to offend couldn’t have been more graphically illustrated. It was, and remains, a marvellous book about the transmogrification of life, and style, into ‘life-style’ and meaningless freedoms. It was also a prophetic book, which set the scene – the theatrical metaphor is appropriate – for the novels of protest and Liberation in the next decade, where women writers rose up to demand to be listened to in their own first persons, the ‘I’ without the irony.

      She, on the other hand, might well have taken refuge in nostalgia – nostalgia for the cultural conditions that would give a voice like hers a more direct part in the script. The thing was, I suppose, that she could never reconcile herself to the notion that literature and life should fall apart, nor to the notion (which she’d have thought utopian in the extreme) that they could come together again. Like Humpty Dumpty, the realist novel and the high liberal tradition, were irretrievably shattered, and you almost feel that it was a point of honour with her not to pretend otherwise. During the Seventies she became more what she had always been, an ‘occasional’ writer – that is, more essayistic, more concerned to inject the sceptical, cajoling, quizzical tone into the turn of events. In one piece about visiting a press-briefing in Vietnam she’d declared ‘If I had dropped straight from Mars … I would have known from the periphrastic, circumspect way our spokesmen expressed themselves that an indefensible action of some sort was going on …’ It’s a characteristic thought, she was a bit of a Martian, but then the Martian perspective is precisely the one favoured by sceptics from Socrates to Swift, who set themselves up as public eyes, and she doesn’t dishonour that great tradition. For her creation and criticism were inseparable, and circumstances saw to it that she was more of a critic when she created than the other way around. She paid attention unwaveringly, wittily, and without bitterness. She was in public more admired than liked. Gore Vidal says about her, ‘She was our most brilliant literary critic, uncorrupted by compassion’ – and says it with admiration, without irony.

       The deb who caught her muse

      Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart EDITED BY ALICE VAN WART The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept ELIZABETH SMART

      ELIZABETH SMART DIED IN 1986. Her extraordinary novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, first published in 1945, had already been resurrected a couple of times by then. Now it is republished again, along with its companion piece, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. Together these two slim and surreal volumes constitute her fictional oeuvre; and yet she has a better chance of being read in a century’s time than many of her more solid, conventional contemporaries. She keeps being rediscovered, and each time the vividness and panache of the writing are more striking.

      Weirdly enough, she anticipated fate – reached out to posterity, rather than her contemporaries. Being jilted by it is her theme. By Grand Central Station is the story of her love affair with the high style, and with the poet George Barker, which came to a sticky end in low-mimetic prose, and babies. As the blurbs used to put it: ‘They never married but Elizabeth bore George four children’, and then worked in advertising and journalism to support them. Necessary Secrets, made up of excerpts from her journals from 1933 to 1941, covers her pre-Barker twenties and shows how she transformed herself from a rather bored Canadian deb into the passionate and intransigent Bohemian of the books.

      It makes fascinating reading. The journals more than confirm the novels’ picture of Smart as plotting her grand passion before she even met Barker, ‘when he, when he was only a word’. First she buys a Barker manuscript; then she dreams greedily about him (‘If Barker should appear now I would eat him up with eagerness’); finally, she organises a ‘rescue’ package to help him and his wife leave Japan (this is 1940) and come to California, where she plays hostess Lady Macbeth-fashion, conspiring relentlessly to break up his marriage.

      The resulting mess is what she made over into a shapely, poetical agony. Brigid Brophy, prefacing the first Smart reissue in 1966, said that ‘the entire book is like a wound’, and she’s been echoed by many commentators since. It’s a misleading description, though, unless you remember that Brophy (like Smart) is a shameless formalist. ‘Every scar’, says Smart’s narrator, ‘will have a satin covering and be new glitter to attack his heart’ – which pretty well describes the erotic artifice she goes in for. One reason she published so little is that she wouldn’t write the kind of modest prose you can fit in round the edges of domestic life. It was all or nothing for her: eloquent moments of blazing intensity (pain or pleasure, either would do), otherwise silence:

      I cannot write a novel – the form needs padding, the form needs to be filled up with air – for no truth can last so long or be so boringly consistent. I want each word to be essence …

      In the event, she produces her own eccentric form. In the journals she uses metaphors of sex and birth continuously: ‘Each word must rip up virgin ground. No past effort must ease the new birth.’ (Male writers had talked like this for centuries, of course, but they didn’t proceed to get literally pregnant by their Muse.)

      Editor Alice Van Wart says that this edition represents less than a third of the journals. She seems to have done a good job of selecting the material that illuminates Smart the writer, as she pillages seventeenth-century metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert) and contemporary sex-mongers (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) to concoct her own heady style. Smart isn’t a good travel writer (she went round the world, improbably, with a matron who was addressing Women’s Institutes); what’s interesting is her egocentric habit of making everything grist to her mill. ‘Sculpture. Mummies. Jewellery. Shoes’ all serve her purpose. Wars and atrocities turn to imagery – ‘I will not be taken like Abyssinia.’

      This arrogant ingestion of the world is her great strength. She takes things impossibly personally, as sensation on her skin, ‘something only the body’s language can say, oiled by the tides of mysterious passion’. No wonder one of her favourite

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